ART GALLERY
Curators: Debasish Mukherjee & Sayantan Maitra Boka
Curatorial Note
Text: Debasish Mukherjee & Rituparna Roy
We are celebrating this 75th year of our independence as ‘Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav.’ But, we continue to bleed. The people of undivided India paid a huge price for this ‘Azadi’ in the form of Partition; and unfortunately, Partition was not a one-time event that was laid to rest in 1947. Its aftermath and afterlives haunt us to this day.
Sir Cyril John Radcliffe, a barrister with distinguished service during the Second World War, who was given the charge to divide the Indian subcontinent in just about five weeks, soon after the June 3rd announcement of Partition by the British Government in 1947, had never been to India before and had no idea of the land he was called upon to divide. The line he drew, with the assistance of the two Boundary Commissions, to demarcate the proposed independent nations of Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, led to the largest displacement in human history – with 15 million people uprooted, two million dead, and seventy-five thousand women raped or abducted.
There have been two generations of outstanding historical scholarship on the subject of Partition, right from the 1940s up until our day. The pain and emotional trauma have also been extensively represented in literature, visual arts, performing arts and cinema.
When Kolkata Partition Museum decided to collaborate with AUR to create a Virtual Museum, I got involved in co-curating the Art section along with Sayantan Maitra, and it has been an overwhelming experience for me.
Across decades, various artists have expressed themselves on the subject of partition. The generations of artists, who suffered the direct consequences of 1947 vs. the second-generation of art practitioners, who have faced the ripple effect of it; both have individual takes and unique narratives to share.
We have divided this Virtual Art Gallery into three parts: where the first would showcase the artworks of the Modernists; and the second of Contemporary artists, both primarily focusing on the Bengal partition; and the third, and most unique of all, would give us children’s take on the border.
Part I: The Modernists
A proper reckoning of the artistic response to the Partition of 1947 in Bengal can only happen by going back to the early 1940s and considering the artistic response to the events of that period, particularly the Bengal Famine of 1943.
The 1940s was a tumultuous period in India. The course of the Second World War and Britain’s changing fortunes in it directly impacted the Empire. The threat of Japanese invasion on the east of India in 1942 catalyzed a whole series of events: the ‘Cripps Mission’ to decide on the future of India; Gandhi’s clarion call to the British to ‘Quit India’ following the failure of the mission; but worst of all, the man-made Bengal Famine of 1943, which was directly related to British war policy in India. A group of young artists in Bengal were deeply shaken by these events – both by the political turmoil and the unprecedented economic and social crisis. They found the prevalent lyrical style of the Bengal School inadequate to express themselves and “strongly felt the need to evolve a style of painting which would be commensurate with the prevailing reality”. Thus was formed the ‘Calcutta Group’. We have included two paintings by Gopal Ghose from this period, and four sculptures by Prodosh Dasgupta, done over a period of three decades, reflecting the subject.
The Bengal Famine would also speak to another group of radical artists, who were inspired by and committed to Communist ideals. And were, in fact, members of the Communist Party of India. Their art bore searing witness to the times, and 1943 would be a defining moment in their careers as artists. Chittaprosad’s Hungry Bengal: A Tour Through Midnapore District in November 1943 (which was destroyed by the British, with only a single copy miraculously saved); Somenath Hore’s reportage for the Communist Party magazine ‘Janayuddha’; and Zainul Abedin’s ‘Famine Sketches’ remain, to this day, a visual short hand to the Famine. Some of the most well-known works of all these three artists have been included in this gallery, as have been two works by Ramkinkar Baij.
The Famine of 1943 would however only be the beginning of a long series of ‘wounds’ (to echo Somenath Hore’s famous 1970s Series) in that decade that would change Bengal forever. The Great Calcutta Killing of 16th August 1946 would, in fact, usher in Partition violence a year before Partition; and the Partition of India in August 1947 would see Bengal divided along religious lines.
Among the generation of artists who had witnessed the Partition, Jogen Chowdhury readily comes to mind. For him, the power and haunting legacy of black has been Partition’s lasting impact on his art. Throughout his five years at the Government College of Art Calcutta (1955-60), he would hone his skills by sketching his siblings at home in a refugee colony by the faint light of a kerosene lamp in the evenings, as well as the refugees at Sealdah Station who came from East Pakistan, with whose plight he empathized. His situation changed markedly later in life, but black stayed with him – giving new expression to his creativity after he developed an original style with cross-hatching and crisscrossing, as he re-discovered the possibilities of ink on paper. From this point, he used black “with supreme self-confidence”. What was thus a necessity, a default medium for a refugee youth – owing to the lack of resources – became a powerful tool of self expression that would stamp his originality as an artist.
Partition had impoverished the state of West Bengal and radicalized its politics. The effect of this played out from the late 1940s right up to the Naxalite movement and its immediate aftermath in the 70s. The Left Front had come to power in 1967 after a prolonged championing of the cause of refugees in the previous two decades, but betrayed that very cause with the Marichjhapi Massacre in 1979. The artists who rose to prominence in the first two decades of its rule, engaged with the political and social reality of the time in both direct and tangential ways. In the 1990s, however, economic liberalization would drastically change the practice of art, as it would every other aspect of life and society in India.
PART II: Contemporaries
The generation of artists who started their practice in post-millennial years felt a compulsion to look back to the experience of their parents’ generation at the time of Partition, or their own childhood in the aftermath of it, or reflect on displacement and the reality of the border. Five such practitioners – Amritah Sen, Dilip Mitra, Paula Sengupta & Vinayak Bhattacharya, along with me – were brought together by the late Rajasri Mukhopadhyay in a group show, titled The Legacy of Loss: Perspectives on the Partition of Bengal (2021), which was a collaboration between the Kolkata Partition Museum Trust and Kolkata Centre of Creativity.
Being from Epar Bangla, Amritah Sen has had no family history related to Partition; but an experience of collecting stories in the subcontinent, after doing a workshop with Urvashi Butalia in 2012, gave her the inspiration to extend that engagement to Partition stories from Bengal. Ritwik Ghatak’s Partition films became her default frame of reference, and an accordion book one of the chief artworks to emerge as a result.
Both Sen and Dilip Mitra were nudged into working on Partition by Rajasri Mukhopadhyay. Though Mitra had grown up in a refugee colony in Belghoria and done sketching and drawings from the memory of those experiences, it had never occurred to him that they were expressly related to the theme of Partition, or that he could exhibit in a show specifically taken up with the subject until Mukhopadhyay invited him to do so.
Paula Sengupta is the first among these artists to work on the Partition. Her 2010 solo, Rivers of Blood, was a direct outcome of her 2008 visit to Bangladesh (as part of a residency) when she revisited her ancestral homes from both her father’s and mother’s side (in Kumilla and Jessore) in the company of her mother. The sequel to that was Lv Pony (2010), which was inspired by her personal associations with the Indo-Pak wars. We have taken one work from each of these.
Vinayak Bhattacharya’s work is entirely focussed on the border – in, particular, the violence inherent in maintaining it. He lives in Ashokenagar, a place teeming with refugees, and has worked extensively over a period of time in three border districts of West Bengal. His two works featured in this gallery are about security personnel who man both the border as well as offices.
The two works of mine that have been included in this gallery are Gandhi’s Last Fast and Burnt Spaces; both are mixed media works, created in 2020.
Once we started working towards the curation of this gallery, we got in touch with many other contemporary artists – who work on Partition and displacement. We tried to include most of them, but as a matter of fact, could only do so much within a limited timeframe. We would eventually like to include many more important artists in this category.
Born into a family originally hailing from East Bengal but settled in Orissa since 1947, Arpita Akhanda’s freedom fighter and artist grandfather has been absolutely central to her artistic imagination, bequeathing her his meticulously archived diaries and family albums, in which the longing for a lost home is writ large. Many of her paper-weave artworks are inspired by these albums, and pre/post Partition maps of the Indian subcontinent. Performance (live or video) is another important element of her practice.
Ishita Chakraborty, a diasporic artist based in Switzerland, has exhibited extensively in Europe, apart from India and the US. Her investigation of the strategies of resistance narrated by displaced individuals in Europe includes Bangladeshi exiles in Italy, stranded for long years without legal papers. Two such works, scratched drawings both, are included in this gallery.
The Partition of India as a subject has long been an integral part of Manisha Gera Baswani’s art practice. Her ‘Postcards from Home’ – a tribute to her parents’ memory of a home they lost while migrating from newly created Pakistan to India – was a project on the Partition seen through the eyes of 47 Indian and Pakistani artists. Included in this gallery are three recent works of hers that employ her new technique of engaging with the pain and healing of trauma through paper incisions. They are all meditations on the border – in which a radical and poetic hope is juxtaposed with its brutal reality.
Moutushi Chakraborty’s work has always been under-writ with feminist concerns. She had worked on archival photographs and the shaping of women’s identities for more than two decades. A strain of that is discernible in the two works she has in this gallery, which deals with migration at large. She had witnessed first-hand, through her family, the courage of refugee women, and their protectiveness towards their young even while battling grave odds. The triptych is a tribute to that.
Based in the US, Pritika Chowdhury’s art practice has been informed by the Partition connection of both sides of her family; also, importantly, by 20th century philosophical concepts by Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. The result has been an oeuvre that consists of a single, and ongoing, project that she has been working on since 2007 – the ‘Partition Anti-Memorial Project’ – that excavate the counter-memories of both the Partition of 1947 as well the Liberation War of 1971.
Soumya Sankar Bose is the only photographer included in this gallery. The four photographs and a documentary by him are all from Where the Birds Never Sing (2017- 2020) — a body of work on the Marichjhapi Massacre, the forcible eviction in 1979 of Bengali lower caste refugees from Marichjhapi Island in the Sundarbans, West Bengal, and the subsequent death of thousands by police gunfire, starvation, and disease.
Contemporary Artists from Bangladesh:
Mahbubur Rahman and Tayeba Begum Lipi are two contemporary artists from Bangladesh who are part of this gallery. Besides being distinguished artists themselves, as co-founders of the Britto Arts Trust (founded 2002), they have also contributed significantly to consolidating an alternative arts platform and promoting intercultural dialogue in South Asia over the last two decades.
The three artworks of Mahbubur Rahman included here are all part of the series, ‘A line drawn by a razor sharp pen’, which he created after being denied entry into Sikkim for an Arts Festival – because he was a Bangladeshi national. He was not even aware of such a rule till then. It made him think about the fraught history of the borderline, especially on the North East of India, with its many shifts from McMahon to Radcliffe, and the many disputed areas with its neighbouring countries. Cutting up his own collection of currency notes from these countries – including Bangladesh, Myanmar, China, Bhutan, Nepal and Pakistan – he created a new line drawing of the disputed map.
Tayeba Begum Lipi is known for her unusual choice of material – stainless steel razor blades, brass safety pins – in dealing with the subject of female marginality and the female body. She however extends the use of razor blades, and mirror polished stainless steel plates, to explore the notions of nationality and borders as well. This gallery includes four maps created by her using these materials. The mirror polished plates make the viewers participants in her work, by reflecting their images on their surface.
PART III: Chhotoder Border (The Border from the perspective of children)
This section – comprising of drawings – is a take on the Bengal border by children from grades V to XII, studying in a school in a border district of West Bengal. They were asked to write and draw about their daily experience of the border in class; the resultant assignments were collated by their teacher Manjira Saha, in a book titled Chhotoder Border, published by Gangchil in 2019. This was the author’s fourth book pertaining to the Bengal border and partition. It is a refreshing take on what it means to be divided by barbed wires, and yet, lead lives where there are constant exchanges – both social and economic – across it.
We have tried to showcase a broad spectrum of artistic response to the Bengal Partition and its aftermath, and hope that it will resonate with the viewers of V-KPM. Finally, we would like to thank Gallery Akar Prakar, Gallery Espace, Mr Mainul Abedin and Mr. Pradeep Dasgupta for their generous support.